Craft CMS positions itself as the new CMS for Laravel applications

Why Craft is moving away from Yii

For many years, Craft CMS ran on Yii. The framework helped the platform mature. But its limits had been reached. Development of Yii slowed down, the community remained relatively small and there was little momentum to keep pace with the way modern PHP applications evolved. For a CMS that wants to remain relevant ten years from now, that is a risk.

When considering what should come next, Laravel and Symfony were both seriously evaluated. Ultimately, the choice fell on Laravel because that framework is much closer to the daily practice of Craft developers. Kelly says, “Laravel is by far the most familiar PHP framework in the community and comes with a large ecosystem of packages, services and documentation that Craft can immediately connect to. Symfony offered similar technical capabilities, but for a large part of the existing Craft community it would mean a steeper learning curve and less direct alignment with the current level of knowledge.”

Craft becomes a Laravel Service Provider

The move to Laravel is more than a technical upgrade. With Craft 6, the position of the CMS changes fundamentally, from a standalone solution to an integrated component within the Laravel landscape. This means that Craft will not only be used as a CMS for a website, but as a content engine for a wide range of digital applications such as SaaS platforms, mobile apps, customer and partner portals, dashboards or multi channel content distribution. Where organizations in a Laravel environment often build a simple CMS layer themselves, a few management screens on top of a database, Craft can now take over that role with a fully fledged content platform.

To support this shift at a substantive level, Craft has brought in Laravel and Craft specialist Rias Van der Veken to strengthen the existing development team. He is now a Software Engineer at Craft CMS and brings years of experience with Laravel, Livewire and Craft, among other things from his work at Spatie. In this way, he acts as a bridge between the existing Craft world and the Laravel ecosystem, ensuring that the new architecture aligns with how modern Laravel teams actually build and deploy.

Kelly says, “With our new direction, you essentially add Craft to an existing application, after which Craft takes over the management of content such as workflows, relationships and multilingual content. This creates one consistent architecture, in which the business logic and custom functionality live in Laravel, while Craft takes care of the editor experience, content structure and publishing flow. This is a logical next step for organizations with multiple channels or complex content flows, the content layer becomes central, robust and easy to extend, instead of being fragmented across separate tools.”

Craft as a content engine in a mature digital strategy

Independent of the framework, administrators and users can of course continue to rely on the strong points of Craft, such as the combination of flexible content models with a user friendly and intuitive editorial experience.

De Nooijer says, “We have been using Craft for years as the foundation for large, multilingual websites with custom functionality, precisely because Craft does not force content and functionality into separate silos. Thanks to the move to Laravel, that role is further strengthened. We will soon be able to integrate Craft more easily into a broader application landscape in which websites, portals, shops and apps are increasingly controlled from a single architecture. The advantage is that content and functionality work together better, without pulling editors into the complexity of backend systems. From one familiar interface, marketing, communication and product teams can work on brand stories, propositions and customer experience, while under the hood services and integrations evolve with new requirements. I see this as an important step, especially now that AI can automate a large part of content production and the distinguishing power of organizations is shifting toward brand experience, UX and smart content architecture. In that context, a strong content engine under the hood is essential. What you need is a CMS that not only serves pages, but forms the basis for consistent, meaningful interactions across channels.”

Roadmap

The roadmap toward Craft 6 has now been defined. First, the port to Laravel will be completed, after which new features will be added that specifically benefit from the framework. This will be followed by a public alpha and beta phase, during which developers can test the new version in practice, provide feedback and prepare for migrations. At the same time, Craft 5 will continue to be actively supported for five years after the release of Craft 6, including security updates and bug fixes. Combined with a compatibility layer that allows existing Craft 5 code to continue working in many cases, and the migration tool Craft Revamp, this creates a gradual upgrade path instead of a big bang rebuild.

Kelly says, “Anyone starting with Craft 5 today is certainly not behind. On the contrary. New projects that are set up now can later be migrated to Craft 6. This is especially important for organizations that work in iterations and continuously develop, rather than relying on periodic rebuilds.”